Monthly Dispatch
from VILLA ROMANA – July 2023

Europe is struck down with weather extremes: hail and mudslides in the north, extreme heat in the south. Villa Romana in the centre copes – neither the garden nor the house are hit with unbearable extremes, so our continued ecological transition can continue. The seed garden, the vegetable patch, the orto continuo by Leone Contini and the maize planted by Daniela Zambrano Almidón, continue to sprout and cherish, as do the Cercis siliquastrum which we had to plant in the spring to replace two elms that had sadly died.

For the seventh time in a row, we were grateful to host the wonderful ADCF, the African Diasporic Cinema Festival (28 June – 1 July), which opened the month with a series of film screenings, concerts, discussions, panels, and convivial moments to celebrate together. The film Can We Not Be So Self-Centered and Keep Our Experiences to Ourselves? Diasporic Rememberances of Fasia Jansen by Aline Benecke won this year’s prize by Villa Romana – though it was hard to choose among the many significant contributions. We are grateful to the activist and cultural worker Hadija Francesca Sanneh, who together with the founder and director Fide Dayo facilitated the festival and stayed in Villa Romana, alongside festival producer Simona Fabiani. We are also grateful for the enduring collaboration of Elena Micheli, and to the charismatic moderation of Antonella Bundu.  

In these days, we also got the news that the Swiss Foundation Gwaertler Stiftung partially supported our pedagogical and experimental project Beyond Wishful Thinking, and the bigger news that the Italian Council has granted us a publication and research project in cooperation with the publishing house Archive Books and the artist researcher Alessandra Ferrini on colonial archives. This will allow us to support important research, as well as to work on a series of workshops, exhibits and publication projects with our in-house publishing partner Archive, which opened a fantastic new space in Milan in June in Via Arquà.

On 19 July, researcher and curator Marleen Boschen (with whom Villa Romana has made a successful funding bid ... more soon), agronomist Isabella Devetta, musician SADI, and Claudia, Carola, Mistura and Elena from the team, gathered to finalise plans for the medicinal garden that will be planted in a newly available patch of land in the garden. We imagined how to design collectively a healing garden where healing is understood holistically through plants, community and sensory experiences.

Around this time, the house began buzzing already as people from all over started to arrive in Villa Romana for a very special event that we organised for the first time, and that has been cooking for some time: La Volata. She flies (out of her body, not her mind). The event took over an entire evening until the early morning hours, organised in conversation with the director of the Spore Initiative in Berlin, Antonia Alampi. With lectures, dialogic music and performances (Elena Agudio and Mistura Allison from the house, Antonia e Maurizio Alampi, Dance of Oya, Jeanette Bisschops, Nando Brusco), lyrical outbursts (Savannah Morgan) witnessed by dancing and candle-lit table audience, La Volata meandered from a bountiful BBQ to the garden parterre stage and screen (Robert Machiri – Listening to Pungwe), and finally into the Sala Giardini where Lynhan Balatbat and Emeka Ogboh kept us on our feet until we had to close the house in the early morning hours. We give special thanks to all the guests, to the entire house team for staying up so late, and to Pardo for supporting technically and as always with so much joy. 

In the days after, perhaps more slowly than before, we ventured to the hills out of Florence to meet Frankfurt am Main based curator Juliane von Herz, while elaborating a floating and choral project (shush … details to be revealed) with artist Emeka Ogboh, which will find a second iteration in Florence in the very near future, in a very prominent place. 

Quechua artist and activist Daniela Zambrano Almidòn, who stayed with us already twice before for the first developments of our project Testing Grounds / Seeding Worlds to plant the garden and connect to the large Peruvian community in Tuscany, organised a workshop on maize plants and pottery on 24 July. Please consult our website linked above to find out more on the wide range of projects that we are elaborating as part of this unfolding. 

The month of July concluded with a culmination of the buzzing and wild energies, the ecological immersions, and the hands-on workshops of the last thirty days: the take-over organised together with Archipel e.V., and supported with funding by a Culture Moves Europe grant and the Fondazione CR Firenze. For an entire week, over 18 children from diverse backgrounds are welcomed to the Villa Romana, from 9am-6pm every day, for free, to explore musical instrument-making, soil and pottery, the animals of the garden, and to learn how to live together across languages and cultures. This take-over is special to us. While many families in Italy flock to the sea in the summer, not everyone can afford such a voyage, or maybe does not have family and grandparents in the vicinity. The lush garden and house of the villa affords the luxury of a safe and at the same time experimental week, which culminates tomorrow (3 August) at 6pm with a concert by Dudù Kouate and Niko Lefort, and with the presentation of the children’s projects with the open doors on Saturday 5 August, and a final volcanic party. 

In August, Villa Romana remains open as we cook things, and also take care of the children that are plentiful, and full of energy in the last month before school begins again, and as we help to water the dry garden, some of us try to finish their course plans for the upcoming semesters, and we focus on preparing the biggest and most anticipated event of the year – the Open Studios of Villa Romana, for which we would like you to earmark again the 16 and 17 of September! 

photo by Odeon Davis